At the Edge of Ireland (37 page)

The Three
Seanachai

The mirthless man by the fire nodded slowly: “Y'see what I mean—or what George Kerouac…”

“Jack” (both companions, in unison).

“Okay. JACK Kerouac…meant…by sounding like you were seeing things as if you were the first person ever to live on earth.”

“And despite being a Welshman too…,” said the middle man.

“Who? Kerouac?”

“No—Dylan Thomas.”

“Yes—but he was most famous in America,” said the sprawling man, whose chair seemed ready to fly apart as he leaned his huge frame back on it.

“Oh, yes, America. Land of the biggest megawattage-celebrity-bore-writers…”

“Oh—and pray—who might they be?” asked the man in the middle in a pseudo-sagacious tone and with an ironic disassembled grin.

“The ones with that fake display of arrogant adolescence despite the onset of early senility—and then the ones wrapped in teetering naffery with egos as big as pumpkins but as frail as quail eggs—and then the bloody smoothies…the ones scribbling style over substance…the neurotic, alcoholic, depressive, dweebish, affected, academic, self-adoring, and self-hating hedonists parading and preening in front of their own self-made mirrors and giving their creative writing tuition classes for gooey-eyed stargazers and literary groupies. All these godawful, redolently gaseous, hyper-hypocritical blobs of loopy loquaciousness and blubbery bombast…”

“Like?”

“Like? Well, for example, John Updike, whatshisname Cheever, Bellow, Sallinger, Irving, etc., etc.”

“Ah—the Lords of Language…,” said the sprawling man, who had now righted himself, possibly due to the ominous warning creaks of his frail chair.

“But even the big names can have a bit of fun trashing each other,” said the man in the middle. “Salman Rushdie said he thought Updike's novel
Terrorist
was ‘beyond awful' and that ‘he should stay in his little parochial neighborhood and write about wife swapping' because it's all he could do. And Mailer—The Late Big Norman—now there's one who seemed to enjoy being a cantankerous human being and writer. He said Saul Bellow's style was ‘self-willed and unnatural' and that James Baldwin was ‘far too charming to be a major writer.' The old bugger also offended every woman writer around. He said something about there won't be any really decent female writers until hookers start telling their true tales. Or something equally crude like that…but it was typical Mailer. Like when he said ‘piety and prudery take all the art out of true thinking.'”

“Yeah, but there was another critic,” said the sprawling man, now upright, “who the heck was it, anyway. He picked on Bellow too…Described one of his books as ‘the dark grapplings one associates with Russian-Jewish authors transported to America where they become hilarious viewed through the lens of college politics and batty girlfriends instead of peasant uprisings.' Oh, and then he said there's no really good feuds between writers like there used to be because there's no really good writing—no good stories, with a beginning, a middle, and an end—anymore! Hemingway—that great old self-promoter and chest thumper—said ‘the most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shockproof shit detector.' That's why he shot himself, I suppose…an old man churning out too much sh…”

“Good point,” mumbled the man in the middle.

“All carrot and no stick…”

“What?”

“All carr—”

“Yeah. I heard that bit. What's your point?”

“Still bloody sharp—just like it was a minute ago—and it's obvious, I should have thought!”

“Oh, you're on a real roller tonight…”

The literary wrangle did indeed seem to be getting a little heavy-browed fractious among these three odd characters, and I wondered if it was indeed time for me to be rolling home. But before I could empty my glass and move on, the barman leaned over and half whispered—“So what d'y think to our three
seanachai
then?”

“These are
seanachai
—storytellers?”

“Oh yes indeed they are—three of the best. You should be here on a night when they're doing one of their
seisuins
.”

But I was not to hear their stories that night. Instead, I kept exchanging the occasional knowing nod and wink with the barman while these three flamboyantly erudite pontificators and passionate eccentrics continued their lambasting of literature and writers in general. I suppose I should have moved on, but Bantry's not known for its wild nightlife, and anyhow, this impromptu show of mixed misunderstandings was just too good to miss.

The Season of Lughnasa

A
ND, BUOYED ON RIPPLES OF BENIGN
bliss (certainly our bliss)
,
autumn finally came—day by gloriously long golden day celebrating Lugh—the pagan god of sun and light. All leading to the great fall harvests with more pagan-tinged festivities and dances and the smell of fresh-cut hay and the game-season hunting for pheasant, snipe, mallard, and deer and fly-fishing for fat trout and salmon in the dark, peaty-edged loughs, ready to be roasted on the spot over bog wood fires and washed down with fiery “gargles” of potent potato-distilled poteen. And yes—still all this in these days when the homogenizing influences of contemporary changes and the new EU-accelerated wealth of this Celtic Tiger run rampant throughout so much of Ireland.

This is the time for
seanachais
to tell their tales in the pubs by warming peat fires (alas, a declining tradition); for the gatherers to plunder the pastures and woods for mushrooms, hazelnuts, acorns, sweet chestnuts, windfall apples, haws and sloes; for the frolic and froth of Halloween; for allowing the lazy lassitude of the season and the pooled warmth of golden evenings to buoy you up through to the coming chilly times.

The irony here is that springs and summers in Beara are notoriously fickle, but invariably this “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” often offers some of the finest weather of the year—even deep into November. Keats, with his glorious “To Autumn,” reminds us:

Where are the songs of spring? Aye, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too…

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Much as I admire Keats's ability to conjure autumnal moods with their silky sensual ghostings of silvered mists, so magically, I also pay homage to Cork author Damien Enright's fine descriptive gifts, particularly in his enticingly evocative book:
A Place Near Heaven.
Here, for example, he offers a true “sense of place” word-song:

Walking abroad these [mid-October] evenings…flights of curlews rise from the fields with lonely cries and mixed groups of oystercatchers and godwits fly in small squadrons over the sea…Later a soft mist rises from the fields, hazing out the distance. Sounds hang in the air. The bay is mirror-calm, with white birds and bright boats set in the stillness. Smoke rises straight from the village chimneys, blue against the tall dark trees.

And that just about captures it all…

Barn Door, Adrigole

“T
HIS WILL BE EPIC
!”
ROARED THE
TV ad. “A WORLD EVENT WHERE THE TITANS CLASH!”

The flurries of expectations were amazing. This world-renowned USA versus Europe golfing mega-event had been eight years in the planning, with an expected global audience of well over a billion, the attendance of three USA ex-presidents, film stars galore, the gorgeous, leggy, and almost uniformly blond wives of the American players all lined up in identical top-fashion outfits, huge ten-course banquets for fourteen hundred guests created by leading Irish chefs including the irrepressible Dermot O'Shea…and on and on according to the gushings of an unusually enthusiastic media.

 

T
HE
A
ER
L
INGUS IN-FLIGHT
magazine summed it all up rather neatly: “This is it! The long awaited and much anticipated Thirty-Sixth Biannual Ryder Cup arrives on Irish shores this month—September 22–24, 2006—and with it comes the cream of world professional golf and, of course, tens of thousands of visitors…
Céad Míle Faílte.”
Then the writer adds with typical Irish modesty: “We're unlikely to ever get the Olympics, so let's enjoy our one moment in the international sporting limelight.”

Our friends at O'Neill's in Allihies were more positively exuberant, one emphasizing that “this is a real symbol of Ireland's growth as a major world country and a creator of spectacular mega-events that'll capture the imagination of the whole globe!” There were some raised eyebrows at such lofty sentiments, but no one had the courage to contradict the man's statement—especially as he owned the pub and could be quite choosy about his customers.

And it didn't matter a lick of a leprechaun's boot whether you were interested in golf or not. Media promotion of this world-renowned competition was a take-no-prisoners, no-quarter-given tsunami of roiling rhetoric, and as an utter neophyte at the game, I'm happy to leave most of this chapter to the competitors and their verbose commentators. Both seemed to enjoy their skirmishes immensely.

So let's begin with the
Irish Times
: “The Ryder Cup puts on its mega-rich suit and struts its stuff at the K Club outside Dublin this coming week…The biggest sporting event ever on Irish soil gets ready to lift off. Right now, all we can do is count the hours as we wait in a state of anticipation at what may happen when the might of two continents collides. The world is watching.”

Then comes the
Sunday Tribune
: “The Ryder Cup is one of sports' ultimate experiences…America's line-up contains the three best players in the world in Tiger Woods, Jim Furyk, and Phil Mickelson…Europe comes to the table with arguably their strongest team ever including three key Irish players, Padraig Harrington, Paul McGinley and Darren Clarke.”

Of course there's always some journalist ready to add a few controversial comments: “Some would have us believe that America, with their four rookies and their hang-dog expression from their humiliation of two years ago, shouldn't really bother to turn up…They are descending on the K Club with ‘all the intimidation power of the Liechtenstein Navy!'”

Another cynic wrote: “So many politicians and government officials have tried to explain what an ‘honor' it is that this little country of ours has been ‘chosen' to host the Ryder Cup—the subtext being, if you're in any way less than forelock-tugging about the whole business, you're a grubby begrudger.”

One particularly acerbic critic, commentating with the style and flair of A. A. Gill, one of my favorite English journalists, referred to “a wish-wash of millionaire maestos in a jingoistic, willie-waggling competition exhibiting a smarmy mix of fawning snobbery, snide smirking, chippy schadenfreude, and the smug satisfaction of being beatified in the top tier questlists.”

And then comes a little backhanded slap at the government's lack of initial interest in the project by Pat McQuaid, Ireland's enthusiastic promoter of international sports events: “Our political lobbying was a struggle because the Irish government had never invested in a major international sporting event as a publicity vehicle for our country…It took me three years to get the Minister of Tourism to go to the Cabinet and it did indeed involve the government taking a quantum leap in terms of investment…But in the end, millions will now be seeing Ireland in a very positive light across the planet.”

But then it's back to the hullabaloo of journalistic hype: “The hardest job for us, the fans, will be to sit through the inevitable emotional roller coaster unable to hit a single shot ourselves…Make sure your posture is good, your concentration fixed, and you drink plenty of liquids. If the tension gets too much, watch certain shots at crucial moments from behind the settee” (aka couch).

And from the players' viewpoint:

Could it be the ultimate test of mental strength in sport? Is the Ryder Cup just about as big as it gets in terms of pressure, anticipation and expectation? For the player who comes through this crucible of heat, there is a lifetime of accolades awaiting…Some seem to take their game to another level, almost as if the atmosphere lifts them onto a higher plane psychologically…This thing called the Ryder Cup is about match play—you against him or, in a team situation, both of you against both of them…a completely different set of circumstances and rituals to go through…Ideally, each player is able, in a sense, to “get out of his own way” as he plays with all his heart for a higher cause than merely himself…It's certain to be a theater of gripping entertainment watching the very best in the world going head to head and pitting mind, body and spirit against each other.